Beautiful Katamari

Posted: 10/31/07

Katamari is fun. Katamari is stylistic. Katamari is filled with weird and wacky songs. Jumping to next gen, it has retained its charm, and its reduced price, though reduced price isn’t what it used to be, at $40. It’s also lost its original creator, who’s off making jungle gyms somewhere. Katamari is a lot of things, but is it beautiful?

The King of All Cosmos has screwed the pooch again, this time during a tennis match. A well-intentioned service ace ends up tearing a hole in the fabric of the universe, resulting in a greedy black hole sucking up all sorts of things like, well, Saturn. Now it’s up to the Prince to set things right. It’s the same formula as the past game, and the same delightful and surreal spin on what makes Katamari, well, Katamari. Don’t try to comprehend, just enjoy the ride.

The premise of the Katamari games is to roll up as many things as possible, and get your Katamari bigger and bigger. At the start you can only roll up tiny things, but at certain points, like hitting a meter, the camera will pull back and a whole new world of rolling is opened up. Some levels switch it up by having you collect only certain items, but the same idea remains.

Co-op is offline only, with each player controlling one analog stick. It’s not really fun and requires too much cooperativeness, which is a pretty sure sign the co-op mode sucks.

Multiplayer is a battle mode, where you can knock down your opponent’s Katamari into a smaller, puny Katamari, compared to your ginourmous K2 Katamari. Now it’s online, with 4 princes duking it out for bragging rights on the leader boards.

The game remains the same, pure and simple, with the 360’s influence limited to bringing the existing battle mode online and using its processing power to clutter up the worlds a bit more as well as the promise, and the price, of downloadable content on the horizon. The fourth iteration stands with its peers, but doesn’t push past. It feels like a franchise, not a real sequel despite the technological update.

It’s easy to slip into the joyful chaos, and somehow mellow out and roll up some furniture, buildings, or whatever else there is. There’s a sort of zen extracted from this concoction, and even failing to impress the king and replaying a level is no big deal. Levels are short enough while difficulty is reasonable, meaning most levels can be passed on a second go.

The collecting aspect returns as well, where dutiful eyes will uncover hidden packages and rescue playable cosmic cousins. You can also see every single item you’ve ever rolled up, and then which ones you still need to get.

The game is still pretty short, beatable in a weekend of causal playtime, and its forward momentum and laid back feel aren’t really conducive to “rolling them all up” unless you’re an achievement junkie.

The simple geometry of the series is slightly scaled up for the world of HD, but that doesn’t really matter. Low poly counts are low poly counts and the simple, flat textures don’t exactly sparkle under advanced HDR lighting. The tech may be a letdown, but the style, and its integrity, remain rock solid.

The music, peculiar and hum-able, is as awesome as ever. Beautiful Katamari didn’t fall, or perhaps, roll far from the tree. And with its charm, it’s not a bad thing, and it appears that the 360 can output a few more items to roll up. Anyway, spinning over incredibly detailed people and animals and then ejecting them into space sounds sadistic and not very Katamari like. Maybe Rockstar can do something with it.

While the Prince may have nearly doubled his resolution, he has definitely doubled his price. The core game remains unchanged, and the little bonuses that litter the game’s world are just that, little things of little consequence. Online can be fun, but this still remains the sort of game where you just want to chill out and roll over some things, get bigger, and listen to some quirky music, not go competitive and trip up the vibe. The novelty of the series may be gone, but its core stands as a good game idea. It won’t win any beauty pageants, but a big enough Katamari could win a county fair.

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